Jazlyne Sabree The Spectrum of Resilience

April 6 - June 27, 2026
RUMOCA at 301 High Street

This exhibition presents Jazlyne Sabree’s large-scale collages that incorporate paint, paper, and found objects. She elevates her subjects as spiritual messengers, attuned to the whispers of obscured histories of the African diaspora. Through her practice, Sabree examines environment, memory, and spirituality in relation to these histories and contemporary life shaped by a global capitalist system built on the labor of enslaved African people.

Her work investigates Africanisms and the evolution of diasporic belief systems, and the syncretism and acculturation of African cultures, spiritualities, customs, and traditions that, though often absent from the continent, persist across the diaspora. Sabree’s collages hold resilience and fragility in dynamic tension with these themes of displacement and historical trauma.

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Click here to read the gallery guide.

Artist's Statement

The Spectrum of Resilience reveals moments of strength, tenacity, vigor, and adaptation expressed through the spirits of members across the African Diaspora. This work is developed alongside research into my own African ancestry and genealogy, and the ancestral histories of those that I connect with on the way and my own research from literature such as: Oxford’s Archaelogy of the African Diaspora, the African Union’s The Diaspora Division, and Cultural Resilience and Filiel Responsibility Among the African Diaspora: To Be or To Belong among other texts.

These themes of resilience are expressed in the work through posture and moment, capturing the candid lives of the sitters, communicating their authentic spirit and their strength in all of their subtle declarations. It captures the range of emotions, struggles, joys, and pains that are witnessed in the lives of African descendants, calling for acceptance and embrace of their presence and their history in a time where their presence is being inhibited and their truths, erased and distorted.

Jazlyne Sabree (b. 1990, New Jersey) is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Greater Philadelphia area. She received her Bachelors in Art from Clark Atlanta University, an HBCU in Atlanta, GA where she studied art and journalism. She then went on to become an art educator, returning to college to receive her Masters in Art Education at Boston University. She received her Masters in Fine Art at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She is a recipient of the Clark Atlanta University Art Guild Award, the Linda Lora Pugliese Award for Excellence in Art Education, the PAFA Venture Fund Grant, MassMoCA Artist Residency, and the AACC Fellowship at the Montclair Art Museum. She has exhibited with many esteemed institutions such as the Montclair Art Museum of Montclair, New Jersey, The Newark Museum of Newark, New Jersey, and The Colored Girl’s Museum of Philadelphia, PA. Additionally, she has been featured on platforms such as News 12, WHYY, several podcasts such as The Truth in this Art, and in many publications. She was also awarded a teaching artist residency in Monrovia, Liberia in West Africa at the Cachelle International Creative Arts Center, as well as the Casa Na Ilha Artist Residency in Ilhabela, São Paolo, Brazil. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Waldemar Belisário Museum in Ilhabela, São Paolo, Brazil, and the PAFA Museum in Philadelphia along with many other private collections.